Finance, Instability, and Governmentality of Externalities
Moulier-Boutang, Yann
Finance, Instability, and Governmentality of Externalities - 2008.
7
After putting the process of the financialization of capital into historical perspective, this essay focuses on the role of finance capital in the governance of externalities on two levels: 1˚) the first has to do with the revenge of negative externalities. The overexploitation of the planet resulting from two centuries of super-productivist growth has henceforth introduced a structural uncertainty into the global economy that weighs as much upon the price of non-renewable resources as, more fundamentally, the “price of the future as a whole.” For better or for worse, it is now finance capital that is going to be “asked to put a price on the future.” This state of affairs is all the more marked given that the development of activities designed to counter negative externalities is necessarily destined to play a major role in the dynamic of capitalism. Following the stock exchange protocols realized around dot.coms and then housing, it is extremely likely that the next stock exchange protocol will be directed at alternative energy sources and activities related to growth-related damage control. 2˚) The second level concerns the growing role of positive externalities linked to the process of production and the circulation of knowledge. More precisely, the revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the rise of the immaterial translate into two convergent and eminently contradictory effects, to which finance capital brings a particular response. On the one hand, ICTs allow for the digitalization and codification of all that is repetitive in mental activity by depreciating the market value of information. However — and this is where we find our first contradiction — these codified and (re-) digitalized knowledges present a major problem to private appropriation. Although the cost of their initial production is definite, their marginal costs are by contrast very slight or even non-existent — a fact that makes the execution of intellectual property rights that much more difficult. On the other hand, this same automation of repetitive mental activities and the concomitant codification of knowledge displace the heart of value-creative activity towards implicit knowledge that is codifiable only with difficulty: this is knowledge of the so-called second type, constituted by the triptych of creativity / intelligence / innovation. This is the paradigmatic model of immaterial labor that relies “upon the cooperation between minds working on computer and connected by the net (internet).” The subjection of this form of productive network cooperation can only be indirect and formal. Within this framework, finance capital is thus forever destined to fulfill two structural functions. Only finance capital is capable of allowing the subsumption of immaterial labor while realizing the evaluation at fair value of immaterial assets, in a context of structural uncertainty where the “value of knowledge goods oscillates between zero and incommensurable values, monopoly prices which are ultimately political.”
Finance, Instability, and Governmentality of Externalities - 2008.
7
After putting the process of the financialization of capital into historical perspective, this essay focuses on the role of finance capital in the governance of externalities on two levels: 1˚) the first has to do with the revenge of negative externalities. The overexploitation of the planet resulting from two centuries of super-productivist growth has henceforth introduced a structural uncertainty into the global economy that weighs as much upon the price of non-renewable resources as, more fundamentally, the “price of the future as a whole.” For better or for worse, it is now finance capital that is going to be “asked to put a price on the future.” This state of affairs is all the more marked given that the development of activities designed to counter negative externalities is necessarily destined to play a major role in the dynamic of capitalism. Following the stock exchange protocols realized around dot.coms and then housing, it is extremely likely that the next stock exchange protocol will be directed at alternative energy sources and activities related to growth-related damage control. 2˚) The second level concerns the growing role of positive externalities linked to the process of production and the circulation of knowledge. More precisely, the revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the rise of the immaterial translate into two convergent and eminently contradictory effects, to which finance capital brings a particular response. On the one hand, ICTs allow for the digitalization and codification of all that is repetitive in mental activity by depreciating the market value of information. However — and this is where we find our first contradiction — these codified and (re-) digitalized knowledges present a major problem to private appropriation. Although the cost of their initial production is definite, their marginal costs are by contrast very slight or even non-existent — a fact that makes the execution of intellectual property rights that much more difficult. On the other hand, this same automation of repetitive mental activities and the concomitant codification of knowledge displace the heart of value-creative activity towards implicit knowledge that is codifiable only with difficulty: this is knowledge of the so-called second type, constituted by the triptych of creativity / intelligence / innovation. This is the paradigmatic model of immaterial labor that relies “upon the cooperation between minds working on computer and connected by the net (internet).” The subjection of this form of productive network cooperation can only be indirect and formal. Within this framework, finance capital is thus forever destined to fulfill two structural functions. Only finance capital is capable of allowing the subsumption of immaterial labor while realizing the evaluation at fair value of immaterial assets, in a context of structural uncertainty where the “value of knowledge goods oscillates between zero and incommensurable values, monopoly prices which are ultimately political.”
Réseaux sociaux